The Huffington Post recently ran a piece on word clouds formed from frequently used words in classic literary works. It says that word clouds from the works provide an “emotional, impressionistic interpretation of stories we’re used to analyzing methodically.”

Here is the word cloud created from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. There are seven more created from the works of other writers at this link.

Ever wonder about how the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway might change if her characters participated in social media?

Well, let me introduce Joshua Rothman, who writes about ideas and books for NewYorker.com and is also the archivist at The New Yorker. He explores that concept in an interview on data privacy.

In it, he speculates about how Clarissa Dalloway’s life might be affected if a photo of her kiss with Sally Seton, an event she never shares with anyone, had been posted on Instagram, for example. He also wonders how her memory of that kiss would be affected.

Rothman and the other participants in the interview speculate about how the digital age is changing the process of forgetting and forgiving — and forcing us to remember things we may want to forget.

Because in a digital age, forgetting is costly and hard, and remembering is the default. – Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Should we let the crowd decide which authors should be prioritized for digitization once their work enters the public domain? If so, Virginia Woolf would be high on the list.

Of the 1,011,304 authors included on Wikipedia, Virginia Woolf has a ranking of 1,081, and there are 1,902 views of her entry each day, making her the top-ranked individual who died in 1941.

Those figures are part of an algorithm developed by Allen Riddell at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire that automatically generates an independent ranking of notable authors for a given year. In developing the algorithm, he mined two sources: Wikipedia and a list of more than a million online books in the public domain. Nineteen of Woolf’s works are on the list.